Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

Postcard
of mural in Mark Twain Hotel, Elmira, New York
from the Dave Thomson collection

JIM, the slave from Huckleberry Finn

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At
last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter - and then see
if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather
right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and
a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville,
and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt
so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off,
but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all
this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went
on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim
before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight,
sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.
But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but
only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of
calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come
back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where
the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me,
and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and
at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard,
and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the
world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and
see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling,
because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied
a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: